In which the author watches too many documentaries and draws conclusions no one requested
A note on what this is
This is an essay about six lions and, unavoidably, about me. It began as a straightforward piece of enthusiasm — I have spent roughly a year watching wildlife documentaries with a devotion I would struggle to defend in court, and I wanted to write about the most notorious lion coalition ever recorded before the obsession wore off and I was left with nothing but the trivia.
It did not stay straightforward. Somewhere in the drafting it became clear that the reason a person starts watching territorial disputes on the African savannah at eleven at night is rarely a sudden interest in the African savannah. So there is a confession in the middle of this, arriving without much warning, and I have chosen to leave it where it fell rather than tidy it into a more dignified position.
What follows, then, is mostly a comedy about lions, partly an argument about why we keep insisting that animals are teaching us something, and briefly — you will know it when you reach it — something more honest than I had planned. Readers who came only for the lions may stop at the appropriate moment. The lions are genuinely the best part.
There are worse things to become than a man who knows the names of six dead South African lions, but I am struggling to list them.
It began innocently, as these things do. A documentary was playing. I had intended to watch eleven minutes of it and then do something respectable with my evening. Twelve months later I can tell you the composition of the Sparta pride, hold opinions about coalition sizes that I will defend at dinner, and have twice caught myself using the phrase “territorial pressure from the south” in a work meeting, where it was received about as well as you would expect.
The lions in question were called the Mapogos, and if you have not heard of them, I envy you the next four hours of your life.
The gentlemen in question
Six male lions. This is the first thing to understand, and the thing every ranger in the footage says with the particular flatness of a man describing a natural disaster he has personally survived. Coalitions of male lions normally run to two, sometimes three, occasionally four if the gene pool has been generous. Six is not a coalition. Six is a corporate merger.
Five of them were brothers out of the Sparta pride. The sixth, Makhulu, was unrelated — an older male who simply attached himself to the group as a youngster and was, for reasons no one has satisfactorily explained, permitted to stay. In any other circumstance he would have been driven off or killed. Instead he became the elder statesman of the most violent lion coalition ever recorded, which is one of the more remarkable outcomes in the history of showing up somewhere you were not invited.
They were named after a security firm. This is true and I want you to sit with it. Somewhere in South Africa there existed a company called Mapogo a Mathamaga, known for methods that could be described as robust, and when the rangers needed a name for six lions who had begun conducting themselves like an occupying army, that is the one that came to mind. The lions were named after the security guards. Nobody thought this was excessive.
The individual names are where it stops being a nature documentary and starts being a novel. Kinky Tail. Pretty Boy. Rasta. Dreadlocks. Makhulu. And, presiding over the whole enterprise, a lion whom the trackers called Mr. T and the more theologically inclined among them called Satan.
You cannot invent this. I have tried. I have sat with a notebook attempting to invent something with the same tonal range as “Pretty Boy and Satan took the eastern sector in March” and I have failed every time.
What they did, briefly, because I am not a monster
They took roughly seventy thousand hectares. They did it loudly, which is apparently unusual — lions moving into new territory generally have the decency to skulk, whereas the Mapogos arrived roaring, in the manner of a stag party entering a quiet hotel.
The number of lions they killed is given as forty in the careful sources and something over a hundred in the enthusiastic ones. I have noticed that the figure rises in direct proportion to how much the writer is enjoying himself, which is a phenomenon I recognise from the retelling of my own achievements. Either way it included rival males, cubs, and females who declined to be persuaded. Mr. T ate some of them. I am told this is rare. I believe it.
And then, being lions and not immortal, they came apart. Kinky Tail was killed in 2010 by a rival coalition, the Majingilanes, who were younger and had, crucially, not spent six years fighting everybody. Mr. T was killed in 2012, though by whom depends on which account you read — some say the Selati males, some say a pride that had waited a long time for the opportunity. The remaining brothers went the way of all things, and Makhulu, the outsider, the one who was never supposed to be there at all, was the last one seen alive.
He wandered off into Kruger and out of the record. Which is, for my money, the single best ending available to anyone.
The part where I embarrass myself with comparisons
I would like to claim I watch these documentaries for the photography. The photography is superb. It is not why I watch them.
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I watch them because after about the third episode you stop seeing lions and start seeing the office.
Consider the coalition itself. Six individuals achieve, together, something none of them could manage alone, and the entire arrangement rests on the unstated agreement that they will not turn on each other while there is anyone else left to turn on. This is precisely the structure of every startup I have been near. It works beautifully, right up until the external threats are exhausted, at which point everyone looks around the table with a new and unwelcome curiosity.
Consider Makhulu, the lateral hire. Joined without a referral, was tolerated rather than welcomed, contributed size and a certain calm, and outlasted the entire founding team. If you have ever wondered whether it is worth being the outsider who stays quiet and does the work, there is your answer, delivered in the least sentimental possible medium.
Consider Mr. T, who was so effective that his own side became nervous about him. He broke away from the group with Kinky Tail, killed cubs from his own bloodline, and generally behaved in a way that even the other members of a coalition named after a security company found a bit much. Every industry has a Mr. T. He usually gets promoted twice before anyone does anything about it.
And consider the roaring. The lions do not announce themselves quietly, because the announcement is the point — half of territorial dominance is simply making sure that everyone within eight kilometres has heard about it. I thought about this for some time and then, with a heavy heart, opened LinkedIn.
Where the comparison collapses, as all such comparisons do
Here I must be honest, because the temptation to run this metaphor into the ground is enormous and I can feel my hands moving toward it.
The savannah is not the office, and lions are not us, and every documentary that suggests otherwise is selling you something. What looks like cruelty in the footage is a set of incentives operating without commentary. A male lion who takes over a pride kills the existing cubs because it brings the females into oestrus sooner, and he has perhaps two years before someone younger does the same to him. There is no malice in it. There is barely anything you could call a decision.
The reason we find the Mapogos compelling is not that they were unusually brutal by lion standards. It is that we watched. Sabi Sand is crawling with rangers and cameras. A hundred coalitions have risen and fallen unrecorded on that continent, and the only difference with these six is that somebody was filming when it happened, and then somebody else added music.
Which means the story is at least half ours. We gave them names, and once a thing has a name called Satan you are no longer watching biology, you are watching a plot. I include myself in the indictment. I have caught myself feeling personally let down by a lion. There is no version of that sentence in which I come out well.
A brief confession, which I had hoped to avoid
I should probably admit at this point that the year I spent watching lions was not, by other measures, a distinguished year.
It is not a coincidence that a man begins studying territorial displacement in the Sabi Sand at precisely the moment his own arrangements come apart. I have thought about this and can find no innocent explanation. Somewhere around the fourth episode, watching a large male get comprehensively removed from a territory he had assumed was his, I noticed I was not entirely watching a lion. This is the sort of realisation that arrives at one in the morning, uninvited, and does not have the decency to leave when asked.
What struck me was the manner of the thing. The deposed male in the footage limps off into the dark, and there is no scene afterwards in which he sits down to consider whether he was, in some fundamental sense, good enough. He does not review the incident. He does not compose the speech he should have made. He does not lie awake wondering whether the new male has a better mane, superior prospects, or a doctorate from a more prestigious institution. He simply goes somewhere else and gets on with the disappointing business of the rest of his life. I watched this and felt, I am not too proud to say, personally rebuked by a cat.
Because I had been doing the opposite for months with tremendous dedication. I had been conducting an inquiry. There had been evidence, submitted mostly by me, and a verdict, delivered by someone who had left the building. The lion’s advantage is not that he is braver than I am. It is that he has no apparatus for the question. No self to be adjudicated, no committee sitting in the small hours, no running tally against a rival he will never meet. He loses the territory and keeps the animal. I lost considerably less and spent a year mislaying the animal.
I am aware this is projection of a fairly gaudy kind. The lion is not stoic; he is simply a lion, and if he had the equipment for self-pity he would presumably use it as enthusiastically as I do. But there is something in the comparison I have not been able to put down, which is that most of my suffering that year was made of machinery the lion does not carry. The loss was real and took an afternoon. The apparatus took eleven months and is, I notice, still partially assembled in the garage.
What I have actually taken from a year of this
Three things, and then I will let you go.
The first is that dominance has an expiry date printed on it that the dominant party cannot read. Every one of those lions was, at his peak, genuinely unbeatable, and every one of them was beaten, mostly by somebody younger who had been waiting patiently in the long grass to the south. The Mapogos did not lose because they got worse. They lost because time is undefeated and does not require a strategy.
The second is that the coalition is the whole story. Alone, any one of them was an ordinary lion with an ordinary future. Together they rewrote an ecosystem. And what held them together was not affection — they clearly did not like each other much by the end — but the simple fact that leaving was worse than staying. I find this either bleak or reassuring depending on the hour.
The third is Makhulu, who is the only one of the six I think about with any warmth. He was not the strongest. He was not the most feared. He was the one who turned up somewhere he had no business being, was not killed, made himself useful for a decade, and then walked off into a national park under his own power at an age when male lions are generally not walking anywhere. Every other member of that coalition has a dramatic death scene on film. He has an exit.
I am aware that I have spent a year of evenings watching cats fight, and that the conclusions I have drawn would not survive contact with an actual zoologist. But I maintain that a man could take worse instruction from a documentary than be useful, stay in the group, and try to be the one who walks out.
I am watching the meerkat one next. I am told it is worse.
